Sinners reminds me that music is a spell

Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) is my movie of the year so far

Spoiler-free: go see this movie!

Sinners is fun, pulpy, horny, the kind of movie that is a joy to watch in the theater, paying attention amongst the other acolytes of a sold-out show, and two weeks since its release, I finally got to see it. It wasn’t easy! I have a general movie theater of choice, and their screenings have all been sold out. So I grabbed a front-row seat and went and had a time. There’s a lot to talk about with Sinners, but one thing that I loved about the movie was its relationship with music. It’s devoted to a party and showing you just how music casts a spell, via the secret protagonist, Sammie (in a blistering debut performance by Miles Caton). Sammie is a preacher’s son who wants to play the blues, which is why he gets tangled up with Smoke and Stack, his cousins returning home to Clarksdale, Mississippi from a stint working for Al Capone in Chicago.

Clarksdale, Mississippi was carefully chosen: it’s famous for being the place where bluesman Robert Johnson “sold his soul to the devil” and became a virtuoso musician. Smoke and Stack are likely references to the song “Smokestack Lightning,” written by Howlin’ Wolf, one of the premiere blues musicians of all time, whose music has a huge influence on all of rock’n'roll, and whose records and performance influenced people from Ike Turner (who discovered him, technically) to the Rolling Stones. He lived a fascinating, wild life — his bio implies that he straight-up murdered a man to protect a woman — went from sharecropping to selling out shows, and his biography is worth the read, for what it’s worth (and, furthering thoughts of Sinners, his wikipedia notes: “At the peak of his success, he returned from Chicago to see his mother in Mississippi and was driven to tears when she refused to take money offered by him, saying it was from his playing the "devil's music"…)”

The first time I heard of Howlin’ Wolf was thanks to a film called Cadillac Records (2008), which was about blues music, essentially, showing how Muddy Waters (in an incredible Jeffrey Wright performance) went from the sharecropping fields to becoming a major musician, and his tormented relationship with Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody), the man whose record label was putting out this music, unaware of how it’s going to leave a mighty, mighty wake. It’s an uneven movie that spends too much of its time on a romance between Brody and Beyonce, who is playing Etta James. Whereas Wright is giving an all-timer performance, and one scene where Waters meets Howlin’ Wolf for the first time and the two assess each other like proud roosters … it’s two minutes at most, and it’s great. Cadillac Records is my number one movie that absolutely would make for a great TV series, and I hope someone hears my cry, at some point.

I did get the pleasure, when I met Jeffrey Wright at a film screening afterparty over a decade ago, to point to the book in my bag and to say Hey, I liked Cadillac Records and I’m reading the Howlin’ Wolf biography right now because it was so good, thanks for that. That was a nice coincidence, and it’s great to have that moment where you can point to how someone’s art affected you and what you think about. Wright is a brilliant talker in person, and said something to the point of these blues musicians were sharecroppers picking cotton during the day who had the whole of American music in their back pocket, and I think about that a lot, and was struck by the cotton fields in Sinners, the way that this movie visualized the labor that served as the basis for blues, which is, in short, the basis for everything.

The second aspect of Sinners that I found deeply, deeply amusing was the fact that there’s a scene featuring traditional Irish music, as sung by vampires. It’s wild and unexpected and hilarious, and Lola Kirke, who I quite like as an actress, writer, and singer, is very good in her role of a KKK member-turned-vamp. That said, I had a friend who would have utterly killed in the role, a beautiful performer and writer named Elizabeth Butters, who was doing it up in Brookyn and Boston about a decade ago. Every video of her online performing has the quality of early digital video, which is a shame. She’s quite the talent. This is sweet and gorgeous and also terrifying:

I should end this with more Sinners, though. Sammie is played by Miles Caton, this performer who is clearly a prodigy, and just hearing him sing is a beautiful feeling. He learned guitar for the role. He has such a beautiful, velvet tone to his voice. It’s really incredible to hear:

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